All the gold leaf in the world can't hide the economic disaster that is Donald Trump's presidency.
Republicans were forced on the defensive this week after a slew of new economic data confirmed what regular Americans already know: President Donald Trump’s economy is a mismanaged disaster.
Despite Trump’s ceaseless claims of a “Golden Age,” the GOP is facing its strongest economic headwinds in nearly half a decade, and even lifelong GOP voters are pointing fingers at a White House that seems completely checked out.
The bad news kicked off on Monday when outplacement firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas reported that the U.S. economy lost 1.1 million jobs this year, the worst performance since the height of the pandemic in 2020. That’s a staggering 54% increase over the last year of President Joe Biden’s term, making Trump the worst president for job creation across the 21st century so far. Yikes!
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Those job cuts are also accelerating into the holiday season, a period when most presidents enjoy a seasonal bump in employment. Small businesses slashed 120,000 jobs in November according to payroll processor ADP, with most of those layoffs concentrated among firms employing fewer than 50 people.
Meanwhile, the tech titans who make up the core of Trump’s donor base posted record profits this quarter. For Republicans who once positioned themselves as champions of small business, Main Street has now become an afterthought as MAGA minions cash in on the shady crypto boom.
It may be the best time in history to be a Silicon Valley robber baron, but Americans in the vanishing middle class are finding it harder than ever to tread water in an economy where prices are rising across the board. Consumer confidence plunged to its lowest level since April as costs continued to spiral.
And it isn’t even clear that GOP officials understand what’s happening. In a recent appearance at the New York Times DealBook Summit, journalist Andrew Ross Sorkin busted Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent for falsely claiming that Democratic states were to blame for soaring consumer prices.
Trump also raised eyebrows this week when he made the incoherent claim that “affordability is a hoax” created by Democrats and that prices are actually falling across the country. In a year defined by increasingly out-there gibberish, Trump’s claim that Democrats invented the idea of higher prices deserves a place in the MAGA Hall of Shame.
“Just about everything is down,” Trump claimed. “They use the word affordability, it’s a Democrat hoax … I think affordability is the greatest con job. They look at you and they say affordability. They don’t say anything else.”
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Apparently Democrats don’t need to say anything else, because a majority of Americans now blame Trump directly for failing to combat rising prices from the gas pump to the grocery store. A Politico poll published on Thursday found that nearly 40% of Trump voters now say the cost of living is “the worst I can ever remember it being.” Worse for Trump, over 20% of Republicans said he bears responsibility for the bad economy, not Democrats.
Voters also see Trump as a do-nothing president when it comes to tackling inflation. Nearly 20% of Trump voters say Trump has had opportunities to address inflation but hasn’t taken them, a new high among the president’s base.
Democratic victories on Nov. 4 included Mikie Sherrill’s gubernatorial bid in New Jersey, Zohran Mamdani’s mayoral run in New York City, and Abigail Spanberger’s win for Virginia governor.
Democrats are already leveraging those frustrations over affordability to post stunning electoral overperformances, including statewide wins in Virginia and New Jersey in November. Trump may want voters to believe affordability is a “hoax,” but few Americans are buying his bogus message.
Multiple polls show that Americans from both parties want Trump to make tackling inflation his top priority, so how is the White House responding? Pretty much as you’d expect.
During Trump’s Cabinet meeting on Tuesday (where the president decided to take a little snooze), Vice President JD Vance pledged to fix the entire U.S. economy—sometime next year. That’s quite a vibe shift from Trump’s bold 2024 promises to fix the economy “on Day 1,” and yet another reminder that Trump, Vance, and their MAGA cronies are flying blind in the face of a growing economic crisis.
Working families across the country don’t have a year to wait for Republicans to fix the economy they broke. A new Brookings Institution study found that American families are struggling to make ends meet in every part of the country, red states and blue states alike. 20% of middle-class wage earners can’t even afford to live in their own cities anymore due to rising rents and higher overall cost of living. Fully half of Latino and Hispanic families and 39% of Black families report being unable to afford basic necessities. Soon those families will hit a breaking point and the broader economy will plunge into a terrifying free fall.
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It’s tough to overstate how close the American economy is to a deep and enduring recession. Unlike past recessions, which largely hit specific segments of the economy, the downturn forced on us by Trump and his clueless MAGA henchmen is poised to tank every sector of the economy and dissolve trillions of dollars in wealth from the middle- and working-class families’ collective wallets.
And if Republicans can’t solve the economic crisis they created, voters are prepared to elect Democrats who will.
